


Ashes, Ashes (We All Fall Down)

by bette (ferns)



Category: Batman - All Media Types, DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Aftermath of Violence, Alice in Wonderland References, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Autistic Ray Palmer (implied), Drug Withdrawal, Fear gas, Gen, I wrote it gen but if you want to read it as shippy you can, Implied/Referenced Threatened Non-con, Inappropriate Use of Sewing Needles, Mick really does care he's just shit at showing it, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Ray-centric(?), Team as Family, before this starts, everyone is kinda queer, just give him a hug right now, please protect ray
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-16
Updated: 2016-07-16
Packaged: 2018-07-24 11:01:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,507
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7505776
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ferns/pseuds/bette
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ray Palmer is legally dead and doesn't exactly have anywhere to go, with firsthand experience of just how little his life means in the grand scheme of the world. Mick Rory just wishes Ray didn't try to pursue a life of crime. But since Ray seems intent sticking around, Mick might as well <em>try</em> to keep the guy alive.</p><p>It works alright at first.</p><p>And then Ray gets kidnapped.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ashes, Ashes (We All Fall Down)

**Author's Note:**

> This is set in AU where Savage is dead, killed by Kendra as the Occulus exploded, and when Ray tried to become Mick's new partner it actually sort of _worked._

Ray beamed and tossed an arm over the back of Mick’s seat. He had been physically removed from the driver’s side by Mick after he insisted on stopping at every red light even though they were potentially being chased by the police and _hopefully_ not by a hero. Hopefully. “This is awesome!” He crowed, waving his other arm wildly. “I can’t believe-you stole that!”

He pointed at the duffel bag full of money in the backseat. Mick rolled his eyes and wondered if killing Ray and leaving his body in a lake would be considered a public service.

“Was I this absolutely insufferable during my first heist?” He wondered aloud to himself, shooting a glare at Ray out of the corner of his eye.

Ray didn’t seem to notice the jab and kept waving his arm. “I’ve never been in a car chase before. Or at least I wasn’t being the one chased. I was chased by robotic bees once, but that’s different.”

“This isn’t a car chase, boy scout,” Mick sighed. “And be glad it isn’t. Once the cops get your license plate number, you have to ditch the car and get a new one. Not that I would mind ditching this car.”

Ray pouted, patting the seat of the car. “Leave my car alone. I was pressed for time and I had to take one of Oliver’s.”

Mick huffed when he realized that Ray was talking about Oliver Queen, aka the Arrow-or was it the Green Arrow? He wasn’t really sure what name that guy was using at this point. He had just been going by Oliver Queen in that glorious version of the future where he could have been a king. “You couldn’t have taken a nice one?”

“Wouldn’t that make us _more_ recognizable to the police?” Ray asked, tilting his head to one side like a confused puppy. “I thought that you would want a more nondescript car. So I picked this one out. Felicity helped.”

Mick rolled his eyes and didn’t dignify that with an answer of any kind. Just because Palmer was insisting on coming with him on all of these heists didn’t mean that he had to actually talk to the guy, did it? Besides, Ray was too cheerful. Pretty soon he’d get tired of living a life of crime and go back to doing whatever it was that legally dead billionaires did.

Mick pulled up outside of a safehouse, grabbing the bag of money before stepping out of the car and marching up to the door. Mick didn’t even bother knocking-if Lisa or anybody else was in there, they would have already known about the heist. And Mick had seen Lisa naked before (not all at once, just no pants one day, no shirt another) and had no attraction to her. She was practically his little sister.

The criminal slightly regretted not knocking as he opened the door to see a familiar face passed out on the couch, wearing nothing but boxers that were slightly too small. Mick scowled. “What are you doing here, Rathaway?”

The younger man cracked an eye open but didn’t move from his position outside of yawning and rolling over. “This is a safe house. So I’m using it as one.”

“You don’t have permission,” Mick growled, stalking forward into the living room as Ray followed sheepishly behind him. He made sure to stay half-hidden behind Mick, eyeing Hartley the entire time like he was a new species of creature that Ray had never seen before. Weirdo. “You have to ask either me or Snart. And since Snart is dead…”

“He _did_ ask a Snart,” a smooth female voice said from the doorway to the kitchen. Lisa was leaned against the doorframe, wearing nothing but a too-large shirt and a pair of pyjama shorts. “He asked me. And I said that he could come in and use our safe house whenever he wanted. Besides, I didn’t see you complaining when I told Shawna and Mardon the same thing.”

“That’s because Mardon and Baez are _useful,”_ Mick said with a scowl, shooting Hartley an angry look.

Hartley rolled his eyes. “Calm down, no need to get your fireproof panties in a twist.” He looked behind Mick at Ray, who was trying and failing miserably to stand out of sight behind the criminal. “Who’s handsome?"

“Off limits,” Mick answered, glaring at Hartley for a moment before turning his angry gaze onto Lisa. “For both of you.”

Both of them pouted, although Hartley got over his disappointment quickly while Lisa tried to seduce Mick with the puppy dog eyes. They both knew that it wouldn’t work; Mick was pretty much the only one who was immune to them. Len would have melted like an icicle in the hot sun if he had been faced with it, something that Lisa knew full well.

(Lisa had been devastated to learn of her brother’s death, but her grieving process was similar to Mick’s. Hold it all inside for as long as possible before being forced to let it all out when something pushed them over the brink. However, where Mick usually lit fires as a sort of pyre to get rid of his feelings, Lisa just kept them bottled up. This time, they had come out when Lisa saw Mick use the cold gun for the first time after her brother’s death.

Bad didn’t even begin to cover it. Lisa had almost killed someone, going back on her brother’s (now potentially null due to his death) deal with the Flash. That someone had at first been him, and then when she realized that she wasn’t getting anywhere with his death she turned around and tried to kill one of the tellers at the bank that they were robbing together.)

“Spoilsport,” Lisa muttered under her breath when Mick didn’t budge. “What’s he doing here?”

Before Mick could answer, Ray popped up over the pyromaniac's shoulder with a wide smile on his face. “I’m Mick’s new partner!”

“No he is _not,”_ Mick interrupted, shoving Ray back down and pushing him toward the door with a huff of annoyance. “He’s a moron who couldn’t take a hint if it danced naked in front of him. He also won’t leave.”

Ray kept beaming as Lisa looked back and forth between him and Mick. She kept staring for a long time. Hartley did too, although probably only because he was looking at Ray like he wanted to get into his pants. Mick would have to put a stop to that. As irritating as Palmer might have been 99% (the 1% was when he was sleeping and very far away) of the time, he was still off limits to everybody until he proved that he had made the choice himself. (Lisa was a seductress by nature and Hartley had been working on methods of using music to control minds.)

“Who are you?” Lisa repeated her question, narrowing her eyes down to slits and curling her lip up. Mick had known her long enough tell when she was mad about something, and this didn’t look like an angry Lisa to him. More like a confused one that couldn’t decide what emotion that she wanted to be. Lisa’s hand strayed down to her hip as if she were reaching for a gun that wasn’t there. That was an act. Lisa was one of the few people that Mick could read with barely a glance-Len had been the other one. “Better talk fast, pretty boy.”

Ray continued to beam, seemingly completely oblivious to the fact that even an ever-so-slightly emotionally unbalanced Lisa Snart was a dangerous one. “I’m Ray Palmer.”

Lisa immediately relaxed and smiled at him disarmingly. “Well, why didn’t you say so?” She looked at Mick disapprovingly. “You didn’t say that he was this handsome when you were talking about him.”

“You were talking about me?” Ray gasped, whipping around to look at Mick with a delighted expression on his face.

Mick rolled his eyes. “Don’t get a big head, boy scout. I told Lisa about everyone on that damn timeship, which happened to include you.”

Hartley narrowed his eyes and grabbed his glasses off of the floor next to the couch before peering at Ray and sighing. “Well, that’s Ray Palmer alright. I saw you at parties a few times, at least from a distance. My parents didn’t really want me talking to you, though. I never figured out why. But aren’t you supposed to be dead?”

“Just legally,” Ray said with a shrug, smiling cheerfully at Hartley. “But it’s kind of a secret that I’m actually alive, so you can’t tell anybody who doesn’t already know, got it?”

Mick rolled his eyes and pushed past Lisa into the kitchen. He opened the fridge and inspected its contents. “Did you get more beer?”

Lisa peered over his shoulder and pushed some probably expired milk out of the way. “Yeah, I got more. It’s mine, by the way, and you aren’t allowed to have any. I stole it from the _good_ liquor store on 3rd and Fremont.”

Mick smirked and made a point of grabbing the very beer bottle that Lisa had tried to hide with the milk carton as she glared at him. Mick opened the bottle and moved past her, opening one of the cabinets and shoving the bag of money up inside of it. Ray watched the whole time, shifting from foot to foot while trying to look like he knew what he was doing. Which he clearly didn’t.

From the couch, Hartley sighed and pulled on his shirt. “Got any coffee, Lisa?”

“It’s the middle of the night,” Lisa scoffed. “Of course we have coffee. It’s the instant kind, though. I know how much you hate that stuff.”

Hartley curled his lip and squeezed past Ray a little closer than was strictly necessary to get into the kitchen with Lisa and Mick. “It’ll do. And I didn’t know that you cared, Goldie.”

“I don’t,” Lisa replied loftily. “I just don’t like hearing you complain for hours after you’ve finished the actual cup of coffee about how terrible it was.”

Hartley rolled his eyes at her and opened his mouth, probably to start arguing about the benefits of having coffee that didn’t taste like crap. Mick grabbed him by the back of his shirt like the younger man didn’t weigh anything more than a kitten before he could start arguing and shook him slightly, making the room spin for a moment.

“Knock it off, Rathaway,” Mick growled. “You get what we have, and I don’t want to hear any complaining.”

Hartley’s face was flushed pink and his glasses were askew from the shaking. “Fine, whatever you say. Please put me down now, Rory.”

The pyromaniac did so, dropping Hartley to the floor (he landed on his feet and adjusted his glasses with a small grumble of annoyance) before turning to look at Ray. “When are you going to leave?”

Ray crossed his arms and set his shoulders. Mick half expected him to stomp his feet. “I’m not leaving.”

“Yes, you are,” Mick spat as he leaned forward and clenched his hand tighter around the bottle of beer. “You won’t last one minute, boy scout. You’re going to get yourself killed or worse.”

“It was like that on the timeship too,” Ray pointed out, refusing to budge. “Any one of us could have died fighting to stop Savage.”

“Not the best example.” Mick scowled at him, a small bit of begrudging respect growing inside of him when Ray didn’t back down. “Snart’s dead because of that stupid ship and that mission. Just because you weren’t the one that died there doesn’t mean that someone didn’t at all.”

“That was a fluke,” Ray argued, crossing his arms and ignoring the guilt that wormed its way through his chest. _“I_ was the one who was supposed to die there, you know that. _I_ was the one who wasn’t supposed to make it. Snart may have died, but he wasn’t supposed to!”

Lisa made a small sound of something that might have been anger, and Mick realized that he hadn’t told her that Ray had tried to sacrifice himself to save the rest of them. He’d just told her that Leonard had knocked him out, taken his place, and then been blown up destroying the Oculus to further their mission against the Time Masters and that bastard Savage. Nothing else.

Ray appeared to notice that as well and took a small step back as Lisa moved forward to push her face into his. “You tried to sacrifice yourself?” She asked, although it was more like a statement. “You tried to let yourself die in order to save my brother and the others? But you failed?”

Ray nodded slowly and uncertainly. Mick narrowed his eyes. Lisa had been unpredictable since Leonard’s death. Right now she seemed to be in one of her more easygoing spots, acting like she had before her brother’s death. But that could change in an instant, especially this close to someone who believed that they had had a hand (however inadvertent) in Leonard’s death.

(Mick knew for a fact that Haircut hadn’t meant to kill Len. Of course he hadn’t. And he hadn’t had any part in it, either, no matter how much he seemed to believe that he did. It was Mick’s fault, really, in the end. He should have been on the lookout, he should have seen what his partner was planning. Should have stopped him. Len never did anything without a plan, even if it was one thrown together at the last minute.)

Lisa nodded and turned around before taking off from the room at speeds that would have made the Flash himself proud. Ray seemed to take this as a better sign than her attacking him and looked at Mick hopefully.

“Does that mean that I can stay?”

Both Mick and Hartley sighed in unison.

* * *

Mick tightened his grip around the steering wheel of the car and tried not to get distracted by the way that Ray bounced up and down slightly in the seat behind him. Next to him in the passenger seat, Lisa rolled her eyes and checked the safety on her gold gun for the hundredth time. “Is he going to stop that?”

“Probably not,” Mick replied, looking at Hartley in the rearview mirror. The scientist looked like he was ready to strangle Ray, his eyes closed and his hands curled tightly into fists. Mick could see that his lips were moving, although what the younger man was mouthing was unknown to him.

“I changed my mind,” Hartley finally said, opening his eyes with a long-suffering expression on his face. “He’s not cute, he’s annoying. I promise I’ll clean up the body afterwards.”

“No killing,” Mick reminded him, pulling up outside of the bank. “Or else the Flash is going to come for you and take you back to that basement prison of his.”

Hartley scoffed and glared at Ray, who had stopped bouncing and was looking at him sadly, like he couldn’t believe that Hartley found him irritating at all. “Let him try. It’ll be worth it.”

Ray frowned. “I stopped bouncing.”

“And I’m sure that every one of us here is grateful for that,” Hartley groused, “but that doesn’t mean that your very presence isn’t causing me actual physical pain.”

Mick considered bodily throwing both Hartley and Ray out of the car together to sort out their differences and continue on to the place where they would do the heist without them, but remembered that they needed Ray to hack into the security system or at the very least override it. Which meant that he would only be throwing Hartley out.

Clearly reading his expression, Lisa set a hand on Mick’s arm before turning around and batting her eyelashes at Hartley. “Piper, would you mind not antagonizing our other resident former rich boy? We need him alive for the heist, and you’re going to be pretty useful too. At least for causing a distraction.”

Hartley crossed his arms and huffed. “I don’t see why you need him,” he muttered. “I can hack into things too.”

“You don’t have a suit that can shrink,” Mick stated in a tone that meant that this was going to be the end of the discussion. “Haircut here may not be able to understand that we don’t want him here, but at least he’s useful sometimes. And if we do get caught, Palmer is our best chance of getting out of there _without_ burning the whole place down in the process.”

Hartley glared at Ray and Mick from behind his glasses before turning to look out the window. “Fine,” he grumbled angrily, “but I refuse to keep working with him if he keeps _bouncing.”_

There was a long pause before Ray whispered “I already stopped…” and Mick slammed his head into the steering wheel.

* * *

Ray took a deep breath to psych himself out as he stood outside the door of the house that he was about to break into. It wasn’t like he’d never broken into anything before, but that hadn’t exactly gone very well in any of the cases, and this wasn’t a lab or the house of an immortal villainous dictator. This was just somebody’s house. Somebody that was just trying to make a living, just trying to get by on what little that they had, and now Ray was going to steal from them…

 _“Come on, Palmer,”_ Mick growled in his ear through the comm that Ray had made (and Hartley had ‘improved’), _“we don’t have all night. Rathaway can only keep the alarms down for so long.”_

Ray nodded and darted forward as he felt the familiar feeling of his suit shrinking down around him and carrying him forward. The small propulsors activated, and Ray slipped easily right underneath the small crack in a widow.

The living room (which was the room that he ended up in) was surprisingly spacious, large walls lined with shelves and couches. Ray swooped low over them, nothing more than a small spot of bright light against the dark room. He could easily have been mistaken for a bug or a trick of the light. At least if anybody was home, which they weren’t. But this guy was pretty rich-he definitely had security cameras, which was yet another reason for him to be careful.

“Where am I supposed to go?” He asked, knowing that the others could hear him. “This place is _big._ Even for a normal-sized person.”

A decidedly Hartley-ish snicker sounded over the comm in Ray’s ear and he could practically _hear_ Mick rolling his eyes. Lisa was the one who answered Ray’s question, however. _“Go down the front hallway until you reach the kitchen. The treasure is hidden in a safe disguised as one of two wine fridges.”_

Ray nodded and pulled up in front of one of them, hovering in the air. “Got it. Which one is it?”

 _“The one on the left,”_ Lisa replied. Ray paused before raising his left fist and letting a small thin blast escape it, the concentrated beam hitting against the lock.

(These didn’t seem like wine fridges to him. Wine fridges usually had clear doors. Ray knew that from experience. Not that his experience was extensive, or anything, and he hadn’t seen every kind of wine fridge that there was, but still-)

 _“Pretty boy, you’re babbling about wine fridges,”_ Hartley said, sounding incredibly exasperated in his ear. _“Just hurry up and crack the safe.”_

Ray winced. “Uh, sorry. I guess I’m just a little bit nervous.”

The combination lock popped open with a small clicking sound, a hole seared all the way through it. Ray widened it slightly and then slid right through, looking around and whistling softly.

Instead of the neat rubber-banded stacks of paper money that he was expecting, the safe held what looked like flat disks of gold. There weren’t very many of them, but there were quite a few silver ones. They looked old-Roman or Greek or Spanish, maybe Italian.

“How much am I supposed to get?” Ray asked. “And how am I supposed to get them out of the safe?”

 _“Get as much as you can carry, then go back in for more,”_ Mick instructed. _“Try to fit them through the hole you made to get in.”_

Ray frowned. “I don’t think that the bags will fit through the hole.”

_“Then get creative, boy scout.”_

Ray thought for a moment before turning around in the air, turning both of his blasters (one on each hand) onto one of their highest settings, and blowing the door right off of the safe.

Grabbing as many of the coins as he could in one go (which wasn’t very many), Ray flew back over to the window he had entered the house through and dropped the armful of money into a bag that Lisa was holding open. He went back and forth for what felt like forever, carrying the heavy coins, until finally there were none left and Ray landed on the ground a few feet away from Lisa’s foot so that the woman wouldn’t accidentally step on him.

Lisa closed the window behind him and, to Ray’s surprise, gave him a high-five as soon as he had grown back to normal size. She didn’t even wince at making harsh contact with the padded gauntlets-they were still painful to hit against even after Ray had worked on softening them.

“Come on,” Lisa said, just as loud alarms started to blare through the house, making Ray jump about ten feet in the air with a small yelp of surprise that made Lisa snicker. “The owner has an app on his phone, he’ll know when the alarms are set off. We’ve gotta get out of here before he gets back to see what set them off.”

She half led, half dragged Ray back to the car. The getaway driver, whose name was Steve-something Ray knew because he had asked even though the others hadn’t-immediately slammed down on the accelerator. That caused Ray to be awkwardly tossed, while still in his heavy suit still in his suit, into Hartley’s lap, making the scientist let out a cry of pained surprise at the sudden weight across his legs.

Lisa laughed at their position and stretched out in the seats that they weren’t taking up, putting her hands behind her head and sticking out her tongue at them. Ray was tempted to stick his out back.

It had certainly gone better this time than their last heist, when Ray had accidentally tripped the alarms before frantically trying to plead his case to the cops after hastily shedding his suit. Luckily(?), Lisa had jumped out of the bushes and shoved a bag over his head before the officer could get a good look at his face. Unfortunately, the next phase in her plan involved dragging him off into the same bushes while cackling, and for a little while it was just the two of them running through the woods.

With Ray smacking into every tree in his path and Lisa offering no assistance whatsoever.

So, yes, it had definitely gone much better than their last attempt at a heist.

* * *

Ray hummed and drummed his fingers against the seat of the car, swaying back and forth in time to the tune. Mick, Lisa, Hartley, and their latest (albeit temporary) addition, a teleporting metahuman named Shawna that looked vaguely familiar, like he had seen her before somewhere, were all inside of the latest safe house while he waited for them to come out. Shawna had promised that she would go with him to the same museum that they had just stolen from as soon as it opened after drawing the short straw.

They were in Gotham to steal a chalice, which had a shoddy security system that Hartley had had no trouble punching into. Ray had been the one to stand guard while Mick took the chalice itself before handing it off to Shawna for her to carry out of the museum and to their getaway car where Hartley was waiting. (Shawna had asked why they couldn’t just hire a new getaway driver instead of trusting _Hartley_ behind the wheel. Mick had replied with the names of several criminals, stating that every driver had already been snapped up.)

Lisa had sprained her ankle in Midway City while trying to get past a laser grid, but that was mostly healed now. Mick had been carrying her around because Lisa’s mood and opinion on her injury seemed to fluctuate between ‘I am completely fine, leave me alone’ and ‘oh god I’m dying, the horror, the agony’. When the latter happened, she would jump onto Mick’s back or into his arms, complaining loudly.

On more than one occasion, Hartley had threatened to knock her out and then sprain her other ankle for her. Or break it if she so chose.

Ray kept bouncing, fiddling with the volume knob on the stolen-er, borrowed car. Mick had the keys, but the dail was still fun to play with. He looked back up toward the house (technically an apartment) and frowned. What was taking them so long? He could understand why Hartley, Lisa, and Mick would be taking forever, especially considering that Lisa was still complaining about her ankle being a burden. But Shawna had promised that she would take him to the museum in the morning after they had pawned the chalice, and it was morning now...

Knuckles rapped on the door of the car that was on the other side of the car from the house, and Ray turned around. Gotham had a strange lack of streetlights, so he couldn’t really tell who it was that was standing outside, but it was probably just somebody in need of directions. And if they were one of the villains that Mick had warned their little team about, then Ray could just hit them and then lock the car again. Or get out on the other side and make a break for the house. Not that there was any reason for a villain to want to get him right then.

Before he was ‘dead’, yes, but not now. Now he was just another henchman, at least in the eyes of most potential supervillains.

Ray unlocked the car and opened the door from the inside, sticking his head out into the drizzling rain that had only just started to freckle the windows. “Can I help you with something?”

He didn’t even have time to pull away before a large hand pressed a chloroform-soaked rag against his mouth and nose, holding it there as he tried to shove the person away and get away from the cloth. But it didn’t take very long before the world went dark, and the last thing that Ray saw was a white mask with red eyes looming out of the darkness at him.


End file.
